The earthquake hypocentres first appear as flashes then remain as colored circles before shrinking with time so as not to obscure subsequent earthquakes. The size of the circle represents the earthquake magnitude while the color represents its depth within the earth.

The first thing you’ll notice is that most of the quakes occur around the Pacific Ring of Fire, a place where earthquakes and volcanic action are common thanks to the boundaries of the pacific tectonic plate.

There are a few events that really stick out:

That enormous flash over Indonesia is the 26th December 2004 Sumatra earthquake, the third largest earthquake everrecorded, which lead to a chain of tsunamis killing over 230,000 people.

The quake in Japan is the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, the fourth largest earthquake ever recorded, which killed 15,000 and caused the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

But quakes don’t need to be the biggest to be terrible. This last gif shows one of the deadliest earthquakes in history, and it’s not the enormous flash of 27th February 2010 Chilean earthquake which killed several hundred.